Cicero Rules
Vega
Hugh and Annie
Thu 11 Feb 2016 22:58
Now we are back in the marina again and today the riggers replaced the broken halyard with a mousing line and took off the shroud that needs replacing. Nothing yet towards replacing the broken reefing line so we hope they do complete the work as promised by the end of this week. Annie has been doing some passage planning and the Islands we intend to visit on the way down to Grenada all look wonderful. We’ll leave the boat in Grenada from mid June to mid August and have an extended trip home as Nick and Marie Louise are getting married at the end of July and will spend their honeymoon on Vega. After Grenada we would like to visit Trinidad and Tobago and their rainforest. Our worry is piracy, with some armed robberies reported recently at sea between Granada and Trinidad with the “pirates” coming out of Venezuela. A shame because Venezuela used to be a wonderful cruising area, now to be avoided. We will need to keep to the offshore islands such as Bonaire on our way across to Columbia where will leave Vega during our Christmas return to the UK. We are even starting to plan the passage through the Panama Canal at the end of January or in February 2017 and it looks like there is good cruising around islands on both sides of Panama.
Lots to look forward to but in the meantime we wait for the rigging repairs to be completed and do everything else we can to get Vega ready for the next stage of our travels. When we left the UK we had 50m of anchor chain which meant we could anchor comfortably in up to 12m of water, a little deeper if needs must. Thinking this not enough for the varied anchorages likely to be encountered we had another 30m added in Lanzarote meaning that we could anchor comfortably in up to 20m, again deeper if needs must. We were therefore alarmed to read in the cruising guide that we should expect to be anchoring in 30m or more of water in the Caribbean! However, those regulars we have spoken to rarely anchor in more that 4m and the British Offshore Sailing School boat next to us in the marina seemed to be managing perfectly well with only 40m of chain. Yesterday we finally got around to fixing depth markers on the new part of the chain only to discover that we have been short changed (chained?!) by two metres!
When not polishing the metalwork, marking the anchor chain or fretting about the riggers I am now immersed in a combination of the Robert Harris novel “Imperium” which is one book of a trilogy about Cicero, and Mary Beard’s “SPQR” which is a history of the Roman Empire (trying to balance the fiction with a bit of fact verification). Imperium is a really gripping read about power and politics and the literary (public school educated) classes are waxing lyrical about it both because it is what they were taught at school and for its relevance to contemporary power and politics to which they are intimately connected. And there’s the rub. Nothing has changed in over 2000 years. A psychopath like Tony Blair is still able to make an agreement with another foreign leader to take us into a war to further personal unspecified aims against the clear wishes of the majority of the population (and in a so called “democracy”). We are still ruled by a self serving elite that only the Scottish seem to have the balls to stand up against. As a result it looks like we English (and Welsh) can have the reassurance to know that the next generation of Camerons, Osbornes and Sir Humphries are being groomed through public school and Oxbridge to guide us, lead us, judge us, run our institutions and, most importantly, support their chums in the city to make the money that is so important to ensure this continuum that has served the majority of the population so well for so long. Merely doffing our forelocks and voting them into office is not enough gratitude and deference of course. We must enable them to continue to shower each other with the rewards and titles they so richly deserve. Long live the Roman Empire! (and I do still recommend Imperium).